Saturday, 13 October 2012

Counter-Pastoral

What is the
comparative of prolific?

John
Kinsella, in this latest extension of his “counter-pastoral” project (The
Hierarchy of Sheep, Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1-86368-315-1 85pp) manages a
tricky balancing act between the extreme givens of the bush and the fashions of
art gallery and English Department. A belligerent posturing is implicit in
Kinsella’s term, while there is only so far a poet can be anti-Georgics or
extra-Georgics or post-Georgics before the game becomes exhausted or obvious.
Nevertheless,“counter-pastoral” is an
extended essay that takes the Pastoral concerns and illusoriness of ancient and
18th century Europe and tests them against our own realities:
environmental degradation, both random and systematic destruction of nature by
humans, and a seeming indifference on the part of many Australians to do
anything about these things. In the midst of this, at least one vital concern
ties us to those earlier Augustan times: livability. At or just below the
surface of Kinsella’s poetry run questions such as, what is it to live? how do
we live well? how can we live with this? is this the best way to live?

A lead to
this condition of anxiety within nature is presented in the opening poem,
‘Adaptation’:

The
chemical body

shielded by
foliage

plays havoc
with the seasonal

turnaround,
the adaptational

quirks of
vampire finches

on a small
island

of the
Galapagos

archipelago.

Charles
Darwin’s inheritance informs the syntactic shifts, permeates the general
contents and dominates the meaning. Pastoral is asking for it and Kinsella has
merciless fun borrowing its antique gambits for own his purposes. Gambling with
gambolling, one might say. Indeed, it could be said, what else would you
expect! Kinsella cuts clear beyond irony in his use of pastoral antecedents
which are phony or unsatisfactory models. His phrase “the grim idyll of the
interior” is an adequate indicator of this poetry’s preoccupations; it also
exposes a dilemma at the heart of Kinsella’s work. After all, an idyll that is
grim is still an idyll. The most intensely descriptive and relentless passages
usually deal with violence in nature and human ingenuity at stuffing things up.
This poet’s absorption with grimness canbe read as a late romantic fascination rather than genuine disturbance or
horror. Consider the poem title ‘Cut in Half by a Sheet of Corrugated Iron
Ripped from a Shed by a Strong Wind’, with its offhand final remark; “...didn’t
know what hit him.”

Intended or
not, the result is a rich evocation of death within nature, with no escape. The
drive of the language, its sense of inevitability, can be seriously at odds
with the political moral that is the unwritten centre of the poem. One is
reminded of Philip Hodgins’ dire dictum that all poetry is about death.
Determined field notes on the actions of nature (“where THE LAND does its urge
thing”) use a language that talks over the top of itself, frantic to include
the full catastrophe. Nature is the reality that is more prolific. Just as the
poems burst forth with recognizable natural achievements, so also they contain
the signs of their own transience and decay. Over and over Kinsella displays
these changes. Intrinsic to the poems’ success is the acknowledgement of what
any “success” in nature inevitably implies; it is quickly observable how often
words like ‘falling’ and ‘failing’ show up in the rearguard actions of his
poetry.

Before such
reality, the cultural world of cities looks uncertain and insubstantial. The
future is very uncertain when it’s a grim idyll. Inside dangerous nature we
come face to face with humans. Kinsella’s world is populated with wife-beaters,
drug-crazed country hoons, corrupt politicians, business sharks, hardened
farmers, mindless hedonists, bigots and low life. Sometimes they are portrayed
satirically to the point of uncomfortable farce (e.g. ‘Killing the World’),
other times with a keen eye to their cruelty, shallowness or, just
occasionally, achieved self-awareness. In such company it is a relief to meet
Mikhail Bakhtin, Kevin Hart or some other conveyor of civilization, their names
prefacing the poems or laced through the lines via the preferred Kinsella
strategy of exposing his sources in the art itself. Who Kinsella feels more
comfortable amongst remains an open question.

So where do
we locate the salve to this callousness of conditions and events? We are
ledto the conclusion that
heartlessness and random destruction might well be the main themes, means and
ends to the situations he depicts. Clues elsewhere in the work to possible
solutions, visions or even just escapes from this inevitability, are not so
readily identifiable. Nearly every poem has what was referred to earlier as one
kind or other of political moral as its unstated centre of gravity. Poetic
alliances between the aesthetic and the political can leave the reader with
divided allegiances. The superb presentation of, say, collapsed land or some
unlikeable hothead, is a valuable asset, while the futility the poems engender
before such facts leave one exasperated. A powerful evocation of crisis is
nevertheless achieved, the possibility of positive change left hanging.
“...Progress a lie, we are / encircled and never/ get free however the day /
strains and fails...” (‘Parallels’) The extent of our tolerance and awareness,
social questions that reach down into our ownpersonal well-being - what can be described broadly as livability - are
the wellspring that saves Kinsella’s work from indulgence, indifference or some
form of ethical despair. This same value of livability gives meaningful purpose
to an existence and a world that would otherwise be little more than
unavoidable torture.

That said,
there is much to enjoy in Kinsella’s varied display. A subversive humour is
evident from the outset in the very title of the book, for what creatures are
less hierarchical than those woolly-heads that follow one another into the
wrong corner of the paddock? It’s the humans who invent the jokes; Dolly the
clone is close by in his ovine sequence. We also later learn that it is tame
lambs that are lowest in the hierarchy, being the first to get killed. Kinsella
shares Hodgins’ laconic bush wit in the two-line poem ‘Rainwater Tank’:

Half full
in winter

Half empty
in summer

raising the
question, why laconicism, that specialty of Australian speech, has not been
cultivated more as a form. There’s a lot of it around. Mind you, once
cultivated, is it still laconicism?

Kinsella’s
clear talent for borrowing voices is most explicit in his loving mimicry of
John Forbes’ delivery in poems dedicated to that poet:

The
interior fights back

like the
inoculated rabbit

in the
Flinders Ranges

as you
watch an adult movie

just to
find that it doesn’t

do the
trick, despite a view

from the
hotel window

out over
the sweeping coast,

and summer
fashions

in the bar
that might be

pure
Sydney.

In fact,
Kinsella’s sheer diversity of voices and prosodic skills are a treat. There is
no let-up. Here as elsewhere we can enjoy for its own sake a masterful use of
the colloquial, as in his short play written entirely in hilariously convincing
rhyming couplets:

Well, I’d
like to get some shooting in,

I’ve had
enough of this fucking wheat bin.

His
exuberant interplay of scientific and artworld language, literary reference and
jargon keep us ever on the alert, and even more so his sudden compression of a
philosophy or a state of being into a few words as, for example, where he ends
an unsettling coverage of a Perth sunset with the line: “Darkness intensifies,
forcing biographies.”